The drizzle is light but persistent as the taxi winds its way through south Belfast, the cooler air a noticeable shift from the late-summer warmth left behind in London. There is an edge to this part of the city, a little roughness around the polish, before a row of Georgian townhouses comes into view. Among them sits Regency House, Belfast’s only Michelin Key hotel. The journey ends just shy of the front door, interrupted by a swarm of television crews setting up cameras outside, an unusual welcome and an early indication of the attention already gathering around the building, which is set to feature in at least two television series. Inside, past reception and into a courtyard-style dining room, is Regency House’s first public-facing restaurant: a compact space centred on an equally compact open kitchen, where Parisian bistro meets Northern Irish produce.
Chris McClurg and Alice Stewart opened the restaurant in late July after taking over the entire Regency House Hotel. For McClurg, the move marks a return home, swapping Cornwall for Crescent Park after 13 years at Paul Ainsworth’s No. 6, where he progressed to chef patron. Stewart also spent five years at the Michelin-starred No. 6, rising from chef de partie to head pastry chef and sous chef before becoming restaurant director in 2022.
Designed around accessible, produce-led cooking, Regency House draws on European classics while placing Irish ingredients firmly at the centre of the menu. With the Georgian Townhouse providing a characterful backdrop and McLurg and Stewart bringing more than a decade of experience from Cornwall, the restaurant marks an intriguing new arrival for Belfast’s dining scene.
A restaurant with range
Regency House launched in its current form in 2022 following an extensive redevelopment, but the building had never previously housed a public-facing restaurant. That has changed with the arrival of McClurg and Stewart, who began consulting on the property in 2025 before taking on the entire hotel and opening the restaurant under its name. The 46-cover dining room spans the main restaurant, courtyard and private dining room, with a small open kitchen at its centre. Exposed brickwork, stone tiling, green banquettes and a circular skylight sit alongside the Georgian architecture, creating a setting that is smart without feeling overly formal.
The offering itself is built around an intentionally flexible approach to dining, with a menu designed to work for both a shorter visit and a more expansive meal. “We don’t want to alienate people,” says McClurg, “we want to be super approachable.”
He describes the starters, or “smaller introductory dishes”, as an option to enjoy with a bottle of wine and be out the door within an hour, while the menu can also be built into a broader experience, with main courses, all designed to share between two people, alongside a range of sides and additional dishes. “You can come here and order in such a way that you can create as broad an experience as you want,” he adds.
We’ve got a mountain to climb to make this work
The cooking draws heavily on McClurg’s experiences and influences while keeping the focus firmly on produce and recognisable flavours. Starters, which are priced between £13 and £25, include a saddleback pig rib with hazelnut romesco and PX barbecue, an elevated version of smokehouse-style pulled pork; and tomato à la merenda with pistou and St Tola goat’s cheese, inspired by a dish from La Merenda in Nice.
The potato cake has quickly emerged as one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, built from two crisp potato rösti with caramelised Lyonnaise onions between them and whipped fromage blanc on top. It can be ordered as a starter, side or additional course, with black winter truffle or UMAI caviar offered as additions. “It’s fast becoming a bit of a pop star,” says McClurg.
The four main courses, ranging from £29 to £38, include Murley Mountain lamb saddle with aubergine, mint and labneh; Seaview Farm chicken with morels and sauce suprême; monkfish tail in red curry sauce; and dry-aged Angus sirloin. Finishing off the menu, desserts include a heart attack inducing beef-fat sticky toffee pudding with Medjool dates, peated whisky and clotted cream.
Years in the making
For McClurg, the opening of Regency House may have appeared sudden from the outside, but the ambition behind it stretches back two decades. “What appeared to be quite an abrupt announcement to some people who maybe weren’t in our immediate circle has actually been, certainly for myself, 20 years in the making - and that’s no understatement.”
Like many young chefs, the idea of eventually having a restaurant of his own was always there, but the reality of making it happen proved less straightforward. “This little thing called life gets in the way, and you realise it’s not that simple. Times have changed. You can’t just walk into a bank, borrow millions and go and do whatever you want.”
Thirteen years at Paul Ainsworth’s No. 6 in Cornwall provided the experience to make the leap. McClurg arrived as an “early-20-year-old, wet behind the ears”, full of energy and enthusiasm but, by his own admission, “not well-rounded”. He left with what he felt were “the right tools” to eventually do it for himself alongside Stewart.
We’ve always had one eye on the future, a bit of a pipe dream, and that is town, country, and coast
The couple had originally been well into negotiations on another property on Lisburn Road when they returned to Ireland, but the deal fell through. Through that process they were introduced to the owners of Regency House, who had been developing the Crescent for several years but had found themselves unexpectedly running a hospitality business. McClurg and Stewart initially came on as consultants, spending three or four months helping to move the business towards a position where the owners could step away.
It was during that period that Regency House began to look like the opportunity they had been waiting for. “We fell in love with the property,” says McClurg, although the initial reaction to taking on the entire hotel was rather different.
“Initially, we thought, no, absolutely not. This is crazy, it’s too big.” The couple had already accepted that their own restaurant would need to start modestly, rather than trying to arrive fully formed. “If we wanted to start with a flashy, all-singing, all-dancing, polished thing on day one, we would have had to have a smaller piece of a bigger pie,” he says. “Our decision was the flip side of that, and that was we wanted to have a bigger piece of a smaller pie.”
The building needed significant changes to accommodate a restaurant, including roofing the former outside courtyard and converting the gym into a private dining room and cellar. Now, what had previously been a 24-cover breakfast operation has become a 46-cover restaurant.
The challenge of the townhouse
The Georgian townhouse brings its own set of constraints. The footprint is fixed, with no possibility of expanding at the front or back: the street occupies one side, while the rear is needed for hotel guest parking. “It is tiny, but fortunately, Number Six was also tiny,” says McClurg. “It’s in a Georgian terrace house and it’s beautiful, but every inch counts, and this is no different.”
The bigger challenge, however, is in the kitchen. The space was never designed for a restaurant of this kind; its equipment was specified to cook breakfast for hotel guests. There is no large French cooking suite, not even an induction suite, but a light commercial halogen unit and an extraction system adapted to accommodate a barbecue and small Japanese grill.
Rather than allowing those limitations to dictate what the restaurant cannot do, they have used them to rethink what it should do. Raw and lightly handled dishes feature heavily at the start of the meal, making the most of the high-quality shellfish available locally, from oysters to other seasonal catches.
We wanted to have a bigger piece of a smaller pie
The limitations become more apparent with the main courses. “There’s physically not the space to cook individual dishes for a table of four,” says McClurg explaining why the menu is deliberately designed around dishes for two to share. “All that would happen is the quality would suffer. The guests don’t get as good a product and the team are getting buried.”
If the kitchen has forced them to be selective about how they cook, the supply chain has imposed similar limitations on what they can cook. Fish is particularly problematic. Despite Northern Ireland’s access to rich surrounding waters, “there are no day-boat markets,” he says. As a result, much of the best fish caught in Irish waters is immediately sent overseas.
Brexit has made sourcing from elsewhere in the UK more difficult too. “I can’t just pick up the phone to our trusted scallop divers in the Orkney Islands and get hand-dived scallops shipped over, because they’re not allowed to be landed in the shell in Northern Ireland.”
The result is a menu that leans heavily towards meat for the main courses, which suits McClurg just fine; butchery and cooking meat, he admits, is his “first love”. Fish and shellfish, meanwhile, are reserved for the lighter, smaller dishes.
Looking ahead
For now, the focus is firmly on making the restaurant work. But beyond that, the pair have always had one eye on what might come next - even if the original vision has evolved along the way.
“We’ve always had one eye on the future, a bit of a pipe dream, and that is town, country, and coast,” says McClurg of the pair’s longer-term ambition to have three properties, all united by the same values in hospitality but each shaped by its surroundings. A countryside site would place greater emphasis on the land, with activities on the property encouraging guests to stay for longer and the restaurant becoming more of a destination in its own right. By the sea, meanwhile, has always been part of the dream and described by McClurg as “ultimately the last piece of the puzzle”.
This little thing called life gets in the way, and you realise it’s not that simple
But for now, the future can wait. The restaurant is less than two months old, and, as McClurg puts it, “we’ve got a mountain to climb to make this work”. After 20 years of talking, planning, setbacks and second-guessing, the duo have finally brought to life their long-held ambition. The goal now is to make it last.